All posts by Evan Hamilton

The curse of event success – a response to SXSW

March 15, 2012Community, TechEvan Hamilton

By regular measurements, this year’s South by Southwest is going to be a massive success. Likely record attendance, big-name premiers, packed houses…wow, they’re really doing something right!

But they’re not. Especially as I talk to folks who have been going to SXSW for more years than I, a picture becomes clear: everyone here is chasing an event that no longer exists. A more quality, intimate event. An event full of entrepreneurs and hackers, not marketers. An event that meant something.

The reality of SXSW’s size is that it simply can’t maintain that quality. In order to accommodate the larger crowds they’ve branched out to new venues. This has meant that panelists have to work harder to get people to come to their particular event, attendees have to traipse many blocks to get to the next venue, and perhaps most significant: there’s less hallway talk. I don’t talk to people as I walk from the convention center to the InterContinental Stephen F Austin. I have 30 minutes, and I have to make it count, because the panel I want to attend is going to fill up quick. Gone are the chance encounters, the lively debates, and the detours to go get beers with new acquaintances.

The core of any conference should be learning and meeting people. With so many options of middling quality and so little time, SXSW is killing both.

I don’t blame the organizers. The event has grown because it was good. The organizers have done their best to accommodate this growth. But should they have?

If SXSW was great before, should they have just stopped allowing new attendees? If that were the case, I wouldn’t be able to go to SXSW. Maybe Evan Williams and Biz Stone wouldn’t have. Suddenly, you’re going to have an event with the same people talking about the same things while the world innovates around them.

Burning Man is dealing with this very issue. This year as they’ve reached their max capacity (even for a huge valley in the desert). Rather than issue a chronological cutoff, they gave out tickets by lottery…instantly alienating many of the founding members and architects of the event who suddenly couldn’t come. Nope, that’s not the way to go.

I’m dealing with this right now as my Community Manager Breakfast in San Francisco grows. An intimate conversation is suddenly not so intimate when there are 30 attendees. I thought about not letting anyone else in…but brilliant friends and colleagues are applying, so that seems counterintuitive.

The answer, I suspect, is not one any of us want to face. We need to let go. Much like TED expanded to multiple events and then allowed anyone to create a TEDx event, we have to let our events grow horizontally instead of vertically. Maybe I need to let other people do breakfasts, or have two breakfasts a month, or something. SXSW needs to give up on fitting everyone and encourage things like North by Northeast, whether or not they control and make money from them. And Burning Man needs to let this passionate community create more, smaller communities, or risk imploding.

Is it easy? Hell naw. I think many community builders are control freaks…because we care so much. We want everything to be perfect and we can’t ensure that if we let go. But you know what? Things aren’t perfect, even when we control them. And organized is not the same thing as great.

Line photo courtesy of dickdavid.
Burning Man photo courtesy of legsonasnake.

The Message of CLS 11: Community Managers, It’s Time to Take Charge

July 25, 2011CommunityEvan Hamilton

Last year I came back from the Community Leadership Summit in Portland with the high-level message that we needed to be spreading our gospel throughout the company. This year, the overall vibe I got out of the event was much more practical:

We need to push back. We need to get serious. We need to take control.

From sessions on how community is marketing to how community managers should be CEOs, the vibe was clear: our craft is now legit, and we have the opportunity to not accept the status quo (“Sweet, we can all get jobs now!” as Jono said) but actually make a difference.

Maybe it’s because I read The Cluetrain Manifesto on the way in and out, but we are the employees in our organizations who deal with what the real world actually cares about: conversations. Real, honest, conversations. And we have the power to grow businesses if we not only encourage and join with these conversations, but also tell the other departments to get in line.

Let’s take these companies by the horn. There is a huge market for community managers, so we’re in a far less precarious position than we have been in previous years. We can get hired somewhere else, so as Danese Cooper of Wikimedia said: if your company doesn’t allow you to communicate freely, quit. It won’t actually hurt your profession. Might actually help (it did for her).

This is not to say that we should set fire to the other departments in our building. Rachel Luxemburg from Adobe came from a marketing background, and her comments were a fantastic foil all weekend: yes, marketing and sales and legal go too far. That’s their job. Our job is to push back. If we’re scared to push back, nothing will get done. If they don’t try to defend their principles, we’ll get our butts sued off. Find a balance. Don’t live in fear, and don’t trash their desks. You have to coexist.

We can make a difference. We have momentum now – let’s use it intelligently. Let’s move this from a silo’d effort to what business is about. I believe we can do it.

Footnote: thank you to everyone who came and contributed to CLS11. You can find notes from this year’s CSL at Wikia. There were some fantastic conversations and many more fantastic people, and I can’t wait to continue conversations with you on Twitter. Didn’t attend, but interested? There’s a CLS West in the Bay Area in January and you can keep up-to-date on CLS itself at communityleadershipsummit.com.

CLS photo courtesy of the wonderful Mark Terranova.
Crop photo courtesy of Tgrab.

Handling the rain – a guide for San Franciscans

March 24, 2011MiscEvan Hamilton

It’s raining in San Francisco today. Which means people LOSE IT. I’m not sure what it is about San Francisco and rain. But I’ve constructed this handy guide for San Franciscans so they can better survive the rain.

1. Don’t freak out
THE WORLD IS NOT ENDING. It’s just rain. It happens pretty much everywhere. You’ve seen it before. Still freaking out? Pretend you’re just in a giant shower. Better? Um…please put your clothes back on.

2. Don’t drive like an idiot
While rain is largely safe, it does change the roads and driving at your traditional 80 MPH will not benefit you. Slow down a little bit. Because otherwise you’ll have to…

3. Prepare for bad traffic
The rest of the people in San Francisco who haven’t read this guide are still driving like idiots. They’re going to get in crashes and slow you down. Does it normally take an hour to get to work? Plan for two hours.

4. If you have an umbrella, don’t walk on the side of the sidewalk with an awning
That’s for people without umbrellas. Duh.

5. If you have an umbrella, don’t walk in the middle of the damn sidewalk
People. Your umbrella makes you about 4 feet wide. If you walk in the middle of the sidewalk, nobody can get by you.

6. Don’t splash bicylists
C’mon man. We’re already wet. If there’s a big puddle and a bicyclist, go around it or wait for them to pass it. Seriously.

7. Once more, DON’T FREAK OUT
Remember that scene in Jurassic Park where they don’t move so the T-rex can’t see them? Think of it like that. If you don’t freak out, the rain can’t hurt you. Just calm down, and everything will be ok.

Have your own recommendations? Post them in the comments!

Photo courtesy of Mohan Kaimal.

How I Prepared for My First Big Public Speaking Gig at FailCon 2010

November 3, 2010Misc, TechEvan Hamilton

It never ceases to bewilder people, but although I will gladly get on stage in front of dozens of people and sing, I get nervous in when I have to speak in public. Even speaking up at a meeting of colleagues can occasionally raise my heart rate. Public speaking is a different beast, and it freaks me and a lot of other people out.

DPP_0001-300x200 Last week I had the privilege of presenting a 40-minute workshop at FailCon 2010, a fantastic conference about learning from your failures. I’ve done presentations before, but they’ve all been relatively short. I knew this was going to be intense, so I spent a lot of time preparing. I think my presentation went well (and so did others) and I’d like to share what I did to prepare, so that it might help you…and so that I don’t forget next time I have to do another presentation!

(Many of these insights came from a book I fortuitously got for free at the Community Leadership Summit: Scott Berkun’s Confessions of a Public Speaker. The book is a bit haphazard but has some great insights, and my dogears on various pages helped me immensely.)

Here’s what I tried to do (and what I failed at):

1. I Took A Strong Position In The Title

“There’s a Customer Out There With a Bullet For You: Ideas That Kill”. Not only does this catch the eye, but by defining what the presentation was about it helped define what it wasn’t about. Instead of talking about everything I know, I knew what to focus on.

2. I Thought Carefully About My Specific Audience

A fantastic presentation for engineers won’t work well for CEOs and certainly won’t work well for a room full of four-year-olds. I took a look at the attendee list for FailCon and the goal of the conference and determined that my audience would be founders/entrepreneurs and community managers who would want some solid numbers and examples along with the higher-level points. I also knew they’d have a sense of humor and be familiar with the tech industry examples I used (Friendster, Wesabe, Google Wave, etc).

3. I Built My Slides Last

This one was really key for me, and it’s the first time I really did it. It’s incredibly tempting (and encouraged in some circles) to build a beautiful set of slides first. This is wrong. Your story should dictate your slides. I spent a week and a half building the story and then built slides to support it. The downside? Less time to make your slides pretty. The upside? Your story is compelling, not just something pretty to look at.

4. I Made My Specific Points As Concise As Possible

Confessions of a Public Speaker states it best: “A mediocre presentation makes the points clear but muddles or bores people with the arguments. A truly bad presentation never clarifies what the points are.” Before I wrote any paragraphs or (to the last point) designed any slides, I carved out specific points that I wanted to cover and then worked to build the content to support them. Kudos to Rich White, CEO and my boss at UserVoice, for pointing out that my slides should spell out each point as well, so people who may have been distracted by their phone or computer can hop back in the conversation.

5. I Practiced. A Lot.

Your audience is giving you an hour of their time. Just as companies don’t deserve customer feedback, you don’t deserve your audience’s attention. I tried to respect my audience’s attention by practicing. After finally constructing a story I liked and building an outline for it, I practiced it several times (the whole 35 minutes through) in front of a webcam, cleaning up my performance and trying to cut out “uh” and “um” from my vocabulary. I practiced my presentation for friends and colleagues, and I changed it based on their feedback. Like any performer should, I practiced. Most people leave out this step because they’re scared (I know I was). Don’t skip it.

6. I Knew The Likely Counterarguments From An Intelligent, Expert Audience

I’ll admit, I didn’t do this as well as I would have liked to. I presented this to friends and colleagues and got some idea of what questions people might have, but I should have asked them to be more aggressive. I definitely got hit with some questions that made me pause. It’s not because my points weren’t valid, it’s just because thinking critically on the fly in front of a bunch of people is hard. Next time I’ll work harder on this.

7. I Got Familiar with the Space

I scoped out the workshop room early in the day and showed up extra early for my workshop to get my setup perfect, walk the stage area a bit, and grok the room. It helped immensely not having to take in these details for the first time right when I went up to present. The nervousness I’ve felt stepping up to the mic at previous events was totally absent.

8. I Set The Pace

People like to know what to expect. I told people what we were covering so they knew when we were reaching the end, and I kept people updated about how much was left. I didn’t call out the specific time I was going to spend on each section (as the book recommends), but I think that was ok – perhaps if it were a longer presentation I would do that.

9. I Asked For Feedback

I failed pretty good on this front, which is especially embarrassing because my workshop was about getting feedback! I meant to print out feedback forms but got too busy, so I had to resort to asking a few folks afterwards about what they thought. Next time I want to make sure I get this right, because most folks will say “it was great” if you ask them in person. That’s sweet, but it isn’t useful feedback.

10. I Tried To Be Likable

I tried to keep a quick pace, be funny, move around when I could, and talk directly to people. I won’t claim that I was a Johnny Carson, but I think I kept things from being dry – which is key when people have a million electronic distractions in the palm of their hands.

11. I Kept People Engaged

To the last point – I spoke to the audience, asked them some questions, and offered free books to those who asked questions during Q&A. People want to be part of what’s going on, not a total observer.

Some other things that helped:

1) My bosses Rich and Scott from UserVoice helped usher people into the room and keep them entertained before I came on. This was invaluable.

2) Cass, the fantastic orchestrator of FailCon, gave me a shoutout in the main room right before my workshop. She’s my hero for this and many other reasons.

3) The fact that the session opposite mine wasn’t very interesting (sorry, that’s just what I heard). Some days you’re lucky.

So thanks to everyone who helped personally or just came out to watch. You can find my presentation on SlideShare if you’re interested. I hope this post helps you put on a great presentation, and if you have any personal tricks, please add them below!

Photos courtesy of Scott Rutherford.

Who cares about the homeless? I just want to read the funny pages.

October 5, 2010MarketingEvan Hamilton

Don’t give me that look. Clearly you don’t care about the homeless, because you don’t buy Street Spirit.

Street Spirit is an independent Bay Area “publication of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) that reports extensively on homelessness, poverty, economic inequality, welfare issues, human rights issues and the struggle for social justice”. AFSC generously pays for this publication to be printed and then hands it out to homeless people to sell to support themselves. It’s a great idea, and I want to be clear that this post is not a criticism of AFSC’s goals – it’s an admirable organization, and I only want it to succeed.

The problem: people are not especially altruistic.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is an essential concept for anyone dealing with humans as part of their job. It’s quite simple: we have different levels of needs, and it’s hard to focus on the higher levels (example: creativity) when we don’t have the lower levels taken care of (example: breathing).

Giving a homeless person money is arguably part of the “Esteem” level. While one might suggest that it’s self-actualization, I posit that most people like to advertise when they are donating to someone. While some morality is involved, a great deal of our motivation is gaining respect of others.

However, more important to humans than Esteem is Safety. This doesn’t just mean physical safety – it also includes financial security. And dealing with the homeless exposes our brains to the possibility that we too could, potentially, end up with no money and no home.

So the Safety requirement of our brain is fighting with the Esteem part of our brain…and most of the time, we just look down and walk by that homeless guy with the Street Spirit.

Part of the problem with Street Spirit currently is that it’s full of political articles about the homeless. While, again, it’s admirable that the AFSC wants to help inform us, this is again triggering the Safety-fearing part of our brain. Not only do we have to confront the potentiality of homelessness when buying Street Spirit, but we also have to read about it? No thanks. 99% of people I know who buy Street Spirit don’t ever read any of it.

The solution: make this a product that we want to buy. Appeal to both our need to seem like a good person AND our personal desire for entertainment.

Make Street Spirit an all-comics newspaper and the homeless will make a lot more money.

We all love comics. Pretend all you want, but anyone who reads a paper is just waiting until they have read enough of the real content to feel justified in reading the funny pages. The opportunity here is this: nobody reads newspapers anymore, but they still want to read the funnies.

Seriously. Find some independent comic strip artists (or see if you can’t get some big-name webcomic artists to contribute) and try this just once. I guarantee you’ll see a huge increase in sales. We get our Esteem, the homeless get some cash, and the world is a slightly better place.

Customer Experience Musings

Evan Hamilton talks customer experience, community, and retention.